


Paper

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Angst, M/M, Prompt Fic, fanfic giveaway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-25
Updated: 2015-04-25
Packaged: 2018-03-25 16:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3816625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After James's death, Q grieves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Paper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [double-0-8](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=double-0-8).



> From a prompt by [double-0-8](http://double-0-8.tumblr.com) on tumblr, who gets an honorable mention prize from my 700 followers fic giveaway for entering more than 1/8th of all of the entries I received, hahaha. The prompt is at the end, though I've changed the prompt slightly to fit the story I felt better.
> 
> This prompt was very touching to me. I have a few fics that I have written in the past and that I am currently working on that explore the nature of grief and our reactions to trauma; parts of this fic, though it is very short, were very painful to write. Please be aware that this is first and foremost a story about dealing with the death of a loved one, though there are familiar faces in each role.

The first, he hangs because he wakes and realises he’s forgot the sound of James’s laugh.  Not the full, happy one he’d reserved for when they were alone, but the wry one he used to use when he was annoyed, the one that had become rarer and rarer the longer they’d been together.  It terrifies him, the thought of losing James.  Of—of losing what fragments he has of James, what precious fragments that can’t be replaced—his fingers shake as he presses the sticky note against the wall.  “Laugh - wry” it says, and it’s the same height as James’s mouth would be.  Was.  Isn’t, anymore.

Each time he feels as though he’s forgetting, he adds a note.  “Eyes - sad” and “Eyes - happy” are joined by “that Sunday morning look” and “that rainy Wednesday look” and “the first time I said I love you”.  “Laugh - wry” gets “happy kisses” and then “smile”, which gets “happy” and “sad” attached, then “horny” and “silly” and “nostalgic” and “sarcastic”, and each time he looks at the man-shaped outline of sticky notes, Q knows a little more that this isn’t healthy, that it isn’t helpful, but.  But then he reads the notes and he can almost feel James’s hands on his skin again, can almost hear his low, affectionate laugh again, and it doesn’t matter at all.  It really doesn’t.

Eve visits him to see how he’s doing, and the sticky-note figure has become such a part of his life that he doesn’t register at first why she’s staring, one horrified hand over her mouth.  What started as a skeleton has been fleshed out, each note tacked to another with little messages now: “I miss you.”  “I love you.”  “I miss you.”  “I thought about you at work today.”  “I miss you.”  “I cried this morning and you didn’t hold my hair.”  “I miss you.”  “I miss you.”  “I miss you.”

“Q,” she says, and her fingers don’t touch the notes, just skimming along the wall in mute sadness as she reads them.  “Oh, darling.”

“It’s nothing,” he says, but there are hundreds of notes, and he’s not fooling anyone, least of all himself.

“It’s been six months.”

“I know.”  And he does, probably better than she can fully understand.  It’s been one hundred eighty three nights alone, one hundred eighty four days wishing he could change the past.

“Love, you saw the body.  He’s not coming back.”

He’s not.  James is not coming back, though it’s not true that Q saw the body; he hadn’t been able to bear looking, not once they’d cleaned him up, put him in a suit, shined his shoes.  The bloody mess that came back in a box hadn’t looked like James, and what they’d put in a new box hadn’t either, but yes.  Yes, Q knows that James is not coming back.  He nods.

“I know.”

When she leaves, he adds another sticky note chest high, at the same spot where he feels as though he’s been shot: “I miss you” again.  He covers it with another: “I hate you sometimes for leaving.”  Then: “I miss you.”  Then: “I will probably love you forever.”  He slides down the wall and adds to the foot: “You’re pretty much it for me.”  It’s true.  He cries anyway.

The smoke is thick, choking, and the firefighters find him trying to collect the notes, trying to bring James with him as some small spark catches and ignites and takes everything around him.  There’s burning plastic, that carbon-ozone scent of hot computers, and they pry him from his desperate scrabble at the wall, haul him out, strap him to a gurney.  Then there are days in hospital, days of surgery and pain, but they let him keep the one note he’s saved, the one clenched in his fist.  It’s useless, some meaningless word—he thinks it says “gunshot wound”, and Eve explains at the edges of his hearing that it’s not a clue, that it’s.  That it’s.  But he can’t focus, and everything is strange.

He leaves.  He leaves the hospital, goes home, and everything’s char.  Everything’s cinders, but he looks through the ash, looks to find his sticky notes that have crumbled and washed away in black paste.  He’s lost James again, and the grief hits him as hard as it did the first time, wracking his frame until he curls sad and small in the damp remnants of their home together.  It’s his fault, somehow, he’s sure of it.

The hand on his shoulder is startling.  He looks up.

“You’re a hard fellow to keep track of, you know.”

Q nods.

“We had an appointment this morning,” James continues, eyes twinkling.  “Imagine my surprise to show up and find you’d already gone walkabout.”

“I had something important to retrieve,” Q tells him.  When he reaches out to touch, James is satisfyingly solid beneath his hands; he curls his fists in James’s lapels until he couldn’t let go if he wanted to.

James smiles.  “So did I.”

**Author's Note:**

> So double-0-8's prompt was:
> 
>  
> 
> _what if James had died and Q wants to remember all his wonderful qualities and starts writing single words on sticky notes that apply to James and he puts them on a big blank wall in his house and then one day a natural disaster happens and it destroys the house. Luckily, Q wasn’t there during the __(insert natural disaster here)__. He knows his house is destroyed, but still wants to go back and try to recover any of the sticky notes. He goes back and starts to pick up the pieces of paper flying around but notices that they are all blank. He goes to the middle of the wreckage and lo and behold is the unconscious, but very much alive, James with all the words Q had written printed all over his body._
> 
>  
> 
> Obviously, I changed the prompt in some pretty big ways, and I hope that doesn't negatively impact your enjoyment!


End file.
